Digital Media Licensing Association

Negotiations for modernizing NAFTA begin today, August 16. The Copyright Alliance felt that it was vital that the USTR hears from individual creators and small and medium businesses about the importance of high-standard copyright provisions in the agreement, particularly in light of aggressive lobbying efforts by internet platforms and user groups to water down such provisions. To that end, DMLA participated in a letter to Ambassador Lighthizer on behalf of organizations representing small businesses and individuals highlighting the need for NAFTA to include meaningful copyright protections, effective enforcement, appropriate limitations and exceptions, and safe harbor provisions that incentivize platforms to minimize infringement.

The undersigned groups represent the interests of a diverse group of small and medium businesses (SMEs) and individual creators in the creative fields. What unites us is a reliance on meaningful and effective copyright laws. Together, the core copyright industries contribute over $1.2 trillion to U.S. GDP, employ 5.5 million workers, and contribute a positive trade balance—and SMEs and individual creators make up a significant part of these industries.

The internet’s global reach has made copyright protections and enforcement increasingly important to free trade agreements. The small and medium businesses we represent are often on the forefront of exploring new models for making creative works available on a global scale. Widespread copyright infringement and unduly broad limitations to copyright protection distort overseas markets and undermine the ability of our members to successfully and fairly engage in commerce.

The effort to renegotiate NAFTA provides an opportunity to modernize the copyright provisions of the agreement for the digital age and establish a template for future agreements. We urge you to look beyond the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and to seek the highest standard of protection for businesses and creators that rely on strong copyright to compete successfully overseas.

Specific priorities for small and medium enterprises, as well as individual creators, include the following:

• Strong and meaningful copyright protection and enforcement. The agreement should recognize the full scope of copyright rights, including making available, and remedies such as injunctive relief and statutory damages.

• Appropriate limitations and exceptions. NAFTA should reinforce the “three step” test for limitations and exceptions that has been the international standard for decades. The three-step test strikes the appropriate balance in copyright, and any language mandating broader exceptions and limitations only serves as a vehicle to introduce uncertainty into copyright law, distort markets and weaken the rights of the small and medium businesses and creators we represent. For that reason, we strongly urge USTR to not include “balance” language similar to what appeared in the TPP or any reference to vague, open-ended limitations.

• Incentives for service providers to cooperate with copyright owners in addressing online infringement. Few SMEs have the means to devote resources to policing online infringement, and we therefore rely on service providers taking reasonable steps to minimize piracy that occurs on their platforms. To promote incentives for service providers to cooperate with copyright owners to address online infringement, the copyright provisions in NAFTA should establish appropriate standards for intermediary liability as well as appropriate safe harbor protections for intermediaries. We urge negotiators to provide for safe harbor protections in broader terms than how they’ve appeared in recent trade agreements. Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office are currently reviewing U.S. copyright law, and we want to make sure lawmakers have the flexibility to address shortcomings in domestic safe harbor provisions.

We thank you for your consideration of our priorities and look forward to working with you further as negotiations progress.

Last Thursday, July 20th, Nancy Wolff, DMLA Counsel, joined with the coalition of visual artists associations in meetings with staffers and representatives to show support for copyright small claims legislation. Association leaders and attorneys from Professional Photographers of America, (“PPA”) American Society of Media Photographers, (“ASMP”) Nation Press Photographers of America (“NPPA”), American Photographic Artists (APA) and Graphic Artist Guild (“GAG”) all were present to show unity and that Visual Artists spoke with a single voice. PPA’s lobbyist Cindi Merifield set up meetings.

After early morning prep, the team first met with Sally Rose Larsen working with Congressman Doug Collins (R-GA-09) who personally introduced himself to the group at the end of the meeting. Next was Chris Randle of Congressman Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-NY-08) office that has been working on a Small Claims bill to be introduced shortly.

After lunch, there was a meeting with Curtis Philp of Chairman Lamar Smith’s (R-TX-21) office. Last, was a marathon meeting with Joe Keeley, Chairman Goodlatte’s office that included Jason Everett and David Greengrass, working for Ranking Member Conyers. This last meeting was significant as it gave the coalition an opportunity to review key issues as Goodlatte has been behind Congress’s review of the copyright Act and copyright office modernization and is planning to introduce a Copyright bill covering several areas of interest including small claims this year.

The overall impression was that the meetings were very productive and important in keeping the interests of the visual artists community in the mind of the representatives.

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) has scored a first during The Championships, Wimbledon 2017 by using Capture’s ground-breaking LIVE EVENTS technology that allows images to be delivered instantly direct from camera – complete with caption information – to multiple simultaneous global destinations.

DMLA is excited to be using the same technology for the DMLA 2017 Conference in October thanks to the sponsorship by Capture.

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) has scored a first during The Championships, Wimbledon 2017 by using Capture’s ground-breaking LIVE EVENTS technology that allows images to be delivered instantly direct from camera – complete with caption information – to multiple simultaneous global destinations.

The system augments the battery of high-tech photographic equipment operated by The Championships’ ace team of photographers – headed up by AELTC photographic manager and sports photographer Bob Martin – that even includes robotic cameras perched on rooftop vantage points.

Thousands of iconic moments that crystalise the essence of Wimbledon have been ‘Captured’ via this technology ecosystem during this year’s Championships, allowing rapid deployment of imagery to the website team and hungry social media sites.

Bob, an award-winning sports photographer who has photographed every major sporting event, stated: “Only the best will do for The Championships both visually and technically. We like every department at Wimbledon to continually live up to our slogan ‘In Pursuit of Greatness’.

“Fractions of seconds can be game changers when you are striving to produce world class imagery in fast-moving tennis matches across 18 different courts and with hundreds of players and countless amazing moments both on and off court.”

“Working with Capture’s terrific technology – and their supportive team – means we can focus on shooting the best images, confident in the knowledge that seconds later they will be being delivered via the Capture system, complete with captions, correct location and attributed to the right photographer. We can even switch members of the photographic team around between courts and matches, and still be sure the right information accompanies the images. It helps to deal with the instant demands of social media,” added Bob.

Alexandra Willis, Head of Communications, Content and Digital at Wimbledon, said: “Bob and his team produce world class content for us, and we are delighted that Capture – who we have worked successfully with in other areas for several years – has brought such immediacy to this process to ensure that we are able to put photography at the heart of our channels.”

Abbie Enock, CEO of Capture Ltd, said: “We have worked with Wimbledon for more than three years, with systems that manage the image library and also brand quality benchmarking – and are very proud to have been able to provide Capture LIVE EVENTS for The Championships. The AELTC, Bob Martin and his team are wonderful clients to work with.”

Capture LIVE EVENTS is part of Capture’s suite of ‘building block’ products that address every step of the digital and commercial licensing workflow – including elegant, shop-window, front-end Capture WEBSITE.

A general view of the grounds on the first day of the Championships 2017 at The All England Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon. Day 1 Monday 03/07/2017. Credit: AELTC/Bob Martin.

View inside Centre Court during the Ladies Singles match between Angelique Kerber (GER) and Irina Falconi (USA) on the second day of The Championships 2017 at The All England Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon. Day 2 Tuesday 04/07/2017. Credit: AELTC/Thomas Lovelock.

The combined image search systems will instantly deliver comprehensive, actionable image sighting reports to clients through their ImageRights dashboard at imagerights.com. The sightings are first analyzed by ImageRights AI, which sorts, ranks and groups the sightings by domain owner, all of which expedites license review and facilitates claim submission by copyright owners. The ImageRights AI can then recommend if a claim should be pursued directly through ImageRights license compliance or through a partner law firm and estimate the initial demand, all in less than three seconds. Since the launch of its integrated image search and case management platform, ImageRights has processed more than 50,000 copyright infringement claims.

“I have known and followed the developments at ImageRights over the years, so when the opportunity was presented I knew ImageRights was the perfect fit,” reflected Matthew Johnson, founder and CEO of Image Witness. “ImageRights has always had an upstanding reputation in the industry and I am glad to see that our clients will be in such great hands.”

Image Witness’ clients will be seamlessly transitioned to the ImageRights service platform and will immediately have access to ImageRights’ fully automated US Copyright Office registration service. Agencies and photographers can register their images with the US Copyright Office through their ImageRights account, either from their ImageRights dashboard or by using the ImageRights Plugin for Adobe Lightroom. ImageRights has successfully registered more 600,000 images with the USCO through the service since its launch less than two years ago.

The Image Witness acquisition also propels ImageRights into the web auditing services market. “Image Witness’ rapid scan image search can be immediately integrated into our existing platform,” said Joe G. Naylor, President and CEO of ImageRights. “We can now deliver extremely fast and accurate image use reporting, accelerating revenue recognition for agencies that previously had to rely on the self-reporting of image use by their largest media and enterprise clients.”

As some of you might already know, our friends Jeff and Joan Shultz’s son, Ben, needs our prayers and support. He was gravely injured during a training exercise as a firefighter in Anchorage, Alaska on June 5th, 2017. Jeff Schultz was the former owner of Alaska Stock and a familiar face at PACA/DMLA events.

Ben is now in Colorado at a specialty hospital for brain injuries. There is a fund-raiser for his family scheduled for August 4th in Anchorage — see info below. If you’d like to donate auction items to this fundraiser please contact: Megan Nicolet at Elite Sports Performance, one of the main sponsors of the event at: 907-952-3200 or megangnicolet@gmail.com

There is also a GoFundMe site for Ben’s Family that you can find here.

Jeff was a long-time member of PACA/DMLA and served as our treasurer for many years. Our hearts and prayers go out to his family and to Ben. I know this will be a long, tough road, so anything you can do will be deeply appreciated.

You can read updates about Ben and send your thoughts and wishes here.

The biggest discussions and debates at the recent CEPIC Congress where centred around Google and our industrys efforts to overcome its dominance on search, and the negative impact it’s having on our on-line licensing and copyright preservation. We also explored emerging revenue opportunities and what the future holds for our industry.

Conversations naturally focussed on legal and lobbying efforts made by industry bodies such as CEPIC, DMLA and BVPA in this area, but we also wanted to highlight to members an emerging technology solution called the SmartFrame, that solves many of the issues discussed in our seminars. Read the entire article here.

In our CEPIC Congress ‘Thank you’ newsletter we mentioned a few of this years very well-attended seminars. The biggest discussions and debates where centred around Google and our industrys efforts to overcome its dominance on search, and the negative impact it’s having on our on-line licensing and copyright preservation. We also explored emerging revenue opportunities and what the future holds for our industry. Conversations naturally focussed on legal and lobbying efforts made by industry bodies such as CEPIC, DMLA and BVPA in this area, but we also wanted to highlight to members an emerging technology solution called the SmartFrame, that solves many of the issues discussed in our seminars. SmartFrame were a sponsor of this year’s CEPIC Congress, indeed you may have seen their coffee cups around, met with their team, or have attended SmartFrame CEO; Rob Sewell’s seminar: “Regaining Control of your Online Images” on Friday afternoon. At his session, Rob demonstrated this innovative image technology that has the potential to revolutionise our industry, and addresses many of the issues discussed at this years congress. For those that didn’t catch that session; the SmartFrame is a patent-pending, secure, embeddable, trackable and interactive digital image format, which is looking to redefine the digital image standard in the coming months & years. As we all know, gaining control and properly policing image content on the Internet is long overdue, and whilst all the legal work being done is helping, it’s going to be a long and uphill battle. Rob believes that the best way to fight technology is with technology – much like anti-piracy control for audio and video content has been accomplished using technology – he believes the SmartFrame technology can do the same for the image industry. SmartFrame:

Helps to protect and raise awareness of copyright of images

Drives traffic and sales back from Google

Can be shared & embedded in a controlled manner, always linking back to the content owner with a one click path to purchase

Provides valuable business data and intelligence from wherever it is viewed

Offers an interactive and engaging viewing experience

And provides new marketing and revenue opportunities for content owners

SmartFrame is starting to gain traction across a variety of verticals including the image industry, publishers, brands, fashion, online retail, property and automative sectors. Their API and dashboard can be integrated into any web platform or application, and SmartFrames can be updated dynamically and retrospectively wherever they have been embedded on the Internet. Further info can be found at www.smartframe.io.One of the big challenges, and a key point of discussion at CEPIC, is the issue of Google scrapping and serving content, and the content then being consumed and shared across the internet directly from their search listings, with no attribution or clear path back to the owner. The SmartFrame technology mitigates this problem, as it ensures the high resolution image remains invisible to Google and web scrappers, while allowing Google to see a small unusable watermarked thumbnail, complete with a clear call to action such as “View Photo”, which then drives traffic back to the hosted platform to see the full secure SmartFrame version of the image. This has no negative impact on ranking, as you can see from this set of Google Search Results for a photographer currently using SmartFrame. The photographers images are on the first page of Google results here, and if you click to the Google Images view you’ll see the top ranking images are also SmartFrame thumbnails – all leading back to the photographers website – where the viewers can experience the SmartFrames and license the images directly or share them in a controlled manner. Further examples of SmartFrames with various configurations can be viewed here SmartFrame ExamplesSmartFrame have a busy features release schedule coming throughout 2017. Next up will be their Tracker feature, which will allow users to view where their images have been shared and embedded and how viewers are interacting with them. Then later in the year SmartFrame users will be able to communicate and advertise to their audiences in new and targeted ways, such as affiliate advertising & product linking to sales stores, in order to generate new revenue streams for our industry, alongside boosting more direct image sales.The SmartFrame team are also working with a reverse search engine company to find infringements, and rather than asking for infringing uses of images to be taken down, they are asking them to swap them out for SmartFrames. In this way they are not only changing the way new content is being published, but also beginning to convert historical content too, helping the content owners to develop larger audiences, greater engagement and driving more traffic back to their / or third party platforms to monetise a variety of products and services. Could this be the future way to protect and monetise our content and grow our industry revenues? SmartFrame have put together a very generous offer for all of this years CEPIC delegates – they are offering FREE integrations and 12 month’s FREE use of their Showcase, Tracker and Monetizer upgraded packages.To book a demo and experience how this technology can help revolutionise your business please contact us directly athello@smartframe.io or visitwww.smartframe.io/request-a-demowww.smartframe.io